Black Life in Pasadena

In our upcoming meeting on November 19th, we will be viewing a presentation by Adrian Panton from the Pasadena History Museum about the history of black citizens of Pasadena from the formation of the city. His presentation has been given before to great acclaim and we are fortunate that Adrian is willing share his time with us for this presentation.

The NY Times has recently published an article about the 1619 Project they initiated in 2019. A copy of the article, "The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History", is available for anyone who does not have a subscription to the NY Times.

Publication of their issue on this topic of the history of race and slavery in this country has started a long chain of events. Our current news environment is full today of reverberations of all sorts related to the August 2019 issue, some directly related and others associated because of other events regarding race relations in the country.

Our last discussion meeting which focused on Critical Race Theory is only one of those reverberations. As became clear in our discussion, most of what we hear in the news about Critical Race Theory is a complete fabrication of work that has been going on in academia for some years. As this article explains, the concept of Critical Race Theory is being dealt with as a subject in historiography, the study of how history is created.

We seem to be going through a very turbulent period where almost half of our country,does not want to know the truth about our past. This is a serious problem for those of us who believe that knowing the truth about our past can help us move toward a better future. Our past includes the making of statements of principles that have inspired people around the world over all the years our nation has existed. As a nation, we have not always lived up to those principles but the principles were, and remain, important. They continue to inspire many people to try to live up to them, and trying to live up to them can make us a better country. We should not lose sight of that even though it upsets many of our citizens to acknowledge that we have not lived up to the principles that were laid out in the formation of our nation.

Information from this article and our awareness of the current discussions in the news media can inform our viewing of Friday's presentation abut the history of Pasadena.

I hope we can follow up on what we have learned from previous discussions and enjoy the viewing of Pasadena's history with Adrian Panton along with reviewing the NY Times article and the impact that their publication has had. The meeting will be on November 19th at 12pm Pacific on our usual link. Email us if you would like to be included on our mailing list to receive updates and the link to get into the meeting.

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